H. Bedford-Jones: "King of the Pulps"

H. Bedford-Jones: 1887-1949
By Peter Ruber

Several generations ago, the man with the impressive name of Henry James O'Brien Bedford-Jones (known to readers of the woodpulp story magazines as H. Bedford-Jones, Gordon Keyne, and by at least another sixteen pen-names) was called the "King of the Pulps."

During the early days of the 20th century, the woodpulp story magazines were, like the newspapers, America's popular entertainment media. They survived the advent of national network radio in the early 1930s, thrived during World War II as escape reading for our troops overseas and those who stayed behind, but began to disintegrate when television arrived in the late 1940s.

The woodpulps came in all flavors and genres from pure adventure, to mystery and detective, Westerns, horror, weird, romance, and various combinations of all the above.

Many a budding writer got his start selling to the woodpulps and a few went on to bigger and better things, such as writing for the high-paying slick magazines, writing books, or cranking out radio, movie and television scripts.

Men like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Max Brand (Frederick Faust), Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, among others, were prolific foundational pulp magazine writers. And then there was H. Bedford-Jones, who out-wrote all his competitors.

Bedford-Jones was "a facile, quick writer with a strong narrative sense, and the will to work brutal hours," writes Robert Sampson in Yesterday's Faces. "...He worked at the business of writing without pose or sentimentality."

Chicago bookman and mystery writer Vincent Starrett recalls this in his 1965 autobiography, Born in a Bookshop:

"...another friend and colleague at the time was H. Bedford-Jones, to give him the name by which he was known to thousands of readers. I didn't see him often, for he alternated between Illinois, Wisconsin, and California; but whenever he came to Chicago we foregathered for an orgy of shop talk. On his own level, Henry Bedford-Jones was one of the better magazine writers of his period. Possibly he was the greatest of that numerous company who, year after year for two generations, filled the pulp magazines with some of the best fiction of its kind in the world. His name worked a sort of magic with readers on the vivid covers of the better all-fiction monthlies, it insured top sales. He was in his time the most prolific and, I believe, the highest paid of our pulp writers. And he was the envy and admiration and despair of those of us who labored in the same field for smaller rewards.

"He was a prodigious worker, of course. In his admirable book, This Fiction Business, he poked fun gently at weary scribblers who thought three hundred words a day a fair stint. Under pressure, he had himself written as much as twenty-five thousand words in a day, a complete story. A good day's work for B-J was from five thousand to ten thousand words. He needed an electric typewriter to keep abreast of his thoughts. Indeed, the speed and quantity of his output gave rise to legends, such as the one about a friend who tried to get him on the telephone.

"'Henry can't come to the phone,' his wife is said to have reported. 'He's working on a novel.'

"'I'll hold on until he's finished,' said the caller.

"I don't know how true the story is; but I have myself seen four typewriters lined up in his rooms with stories going full blast on all of them."

No one knows for certain how many stories, novelettes, book-length novels and serials Beford-Jones turned out between 1909 and his death on May 6, 1949. He used so many pen-names himself, and early on wrote boy's adventure stories under various "house" names for publishing giants like Street & Smith. But historians have safely estimated his output exceeded one thousand four hundred magazine stories and 80-odd books.

Between 1935 and 1946, he appeared in practically every issue of McCall Corp.'s Blue Book, simultaneously under his own name or those of Gordon Keyne, and Michael Gallister, and occasionally a third appearance under one of several fictitious collaborations, dishing out adventure stories, mystery novels, and many incredible series of historical fiction. These series, which would from fifteen to thirty-four chapters, were written with incredible fluidity and historical accuracy.

Historical adventures of all kinds were Bedford-Jones' specialty. He was an avid reader and collector of books on history and military strategy; and whether he was writing about Hannibal crossing the Alps, a sequel to Alexandre Dumas' Three Musketeers, or the historical development of weapons and sailing craft throughout history, the stories surrounding various American flags, the world-wide adventures of the French Foreign Legion, the strange private-life adventures of famous actors, they were the products of his own limitless imagination.

Bedford-Jones was never at a loss to tell an exciting story. And while he was grinding out reams of stories for Blue Book, one of the toughest markets at the time (even more difficult to sell to than the venerable Collier's and Saturday Evening Post), he continued to write prolifically for other top fiction markets like Adventure, Argpsy and Short Stories.

Editors and historians called him "the consummate professional writer," "one who could write to order," making him the highest paid and most successful writer of his day. During the height of the Great Depression, when even he experienced setbacks and declining word rates, the editor of Liberty Magazine offered him an annual salary of $25,000 a year if he would write exclusively for them. He turned it down with a laugh. He was accustomed to earning $60,000 or more per year, which he needed to support his lifestyle, his family, several residences across the country, his book and stamp collecting. He was restless, always on the move, staying at one of his homes for a few weeks, then moving on to a different place and staying in hotels, before returning home to Palm Springs, California.

Despite the formidable reputation he had among his peers, Bedford-Jones was not an arrogant person. He maintained life-long friendships with many colleagues, including William Wallace Cook (his mentor and a prolific writer in his own right); Erle Stanley Gardner (to whom he acted as literary mentor and passed on the mantle of "King of the Pulps" with an elaborate document setting forth his decree); Vincent Starrett, a Chicago newspaper colleague he met sometime before 1912, for whom he wrote his only known chapters of autobiography; Donald Kennicott, long-time Blue Book editor, who published 383 of his stories over a span of thirty years.

His bond with William Wallace Cook was especially strong. They had been neighbors briefly in Marshall, Michigan, in 1907 or 1908, where Bedford-Jones was employed as a jack-of-all-trades on a local country newspaper. Cook, one of the leading dime novel writers between 1890 and 1915, wrote many, if not all of the Nick Carter, Buffalo Bill and Klondike Kit paperbacks for Street & Smith. When Cook's first wife took ill and died unexpectedly, one legend recalled, he was too distraught to meet that week's obligation of a 25,000-word novel.

After the funeral, Bedford-Jones hastened home and wrote the novel under Cook's name in a single draft, delivering it to the Post Office just before it closed. A week later Cook was surprised to receive an acceptance letter and check for something he knew nothing about. That was a major accomplishment for a budding writer whose only credits to that point were newspaper copy, poetry and many unsold stories. But this act of friendship so impressed Cook, that on his next trip to New York he took Bedford-Jones along to introduce him to editors he knew at Street & Smith and Frank A. Munsey & Co., publishers of Argosy and other magazines.

Based on Cook's recommendation and a handful of story samples Bedford-Jones had taken with him, his future was sealed. He became a mainstay of such magazines as People's, Munsey's, All-Story, Adventure, Short Stories, Argosy, Western Story Magazine, Dectective Fiction Weekly, Top-Notch, Blue Book and others. His pace never slacked, until the early 1940s when a series of heart attacks and diabetes forced him to do more reading than writing.

Bedford-Jones was an intensely private man, almost shunning the limelight with a passion. He rarely, if ever, gave interviews or allowed his photograph to appear in a magazine -- although sketches and occasional photographs show him to have been every bit as dashing and charismatic as actor Erroll Flynn.

His private life had its turbulent moments. In the early 1930s, after being divorced from his first wife for several years, their teenage children left his wife's custody and traveled to California to stay with their father. The two older daughters were concerned that their younger brother needed better medical attention than their mother was providing through doctors in Indianapolis.

Medical tests proved his son had a congenital liver ailment and Bedford-Jones had him hospitalized in Los Angeles. Furious, his ex-wife filed kidnapping charges against him and swore out warrants for his arrest in the states of Indiana and Illinois. It took almost five years to get the charges dropped, an emotional period of great stress that did not slow down Bedford-Jones' rapid magazine output -- he needed all the income he could raise at times to pay staggering legal bills. Although he had retained lawyers in Chicago, Indianapolis and California to handle the affair, he took greater stock in the legal advice Erle Stanley Gardner provided from his twenty years' experience in criminal law. Their correspondence detailing the legal moves and counter moves is often compelling reading.

It's not quite clear why H. Bedford-Jones is not remembered today, except by collectors of pulp magazines, when Burroughs, Gardner and Brand are, for their various fictional creations. Perhaps it is because Bedford-Jones did not create icons like Tarzan or Perry Mason, who have carried over into radio, films and television. As a writer Bedford-Jones was certainly more prolific, more diversified, and a better craftsman than his colleagues.

More likely it's because the greater bulk of his best work never got into books or was reprinted in paperbacks. And perhaps because Bedford-Jones himself did not care about literary immortality. His vast library of the historical books and letters of historically important statesmen and warriors vanished after his death, as did most of his correspondence files, manuscripts, photographs, literary records and ephemera. Very little was archived in university libraries. Even the magazines he once wrote for have long vanished into landfills.

But that may change. Writers are always being rediscovered by subsequent generations. With the assistance of various well-known collectors, the bibliographical details of Bedford-Jones' literary days are now coming into focus. King of the Pulps: The Life and Writings of H. Bedford-Jones, by Peter Ruber, Darrell C. Richardson and Victor A. Berch, will be published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box in January 2003. Please write to gav@bmts.com for pricing.

Certainly, H. Bedford-Jones was too interesting a writer to be ignored forever. Some of his best magazine writings should be collected into books. They will show that he was much more than just "King of the Pulps," but a writer of considerable storytelling ability who can appeal to diverse reading tastes.

[Copyright 2001 by Peter Ruber]

Click here for an interview with H. Bedford-Jones that was originally published in the July 1926 issue of Writer's Digest.

Posted by ds at December 10, 2002 02:58 PM

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